Apple releases iAd Producer 2.1

Apple on Wednesday rolled version 2.1 of its iAd Producer software, adding Twitter integration along with a host of improvements and fixes for the advertisement building tool.

Among the various enhancements, the two standout features of iAd Producer 2.1 brings support for the third-generation iPad and offers Twitter integration for a more social iAd experience.

From the release notes:

This update contains various improvements and fixes that:
 Provide improved load and save performance for iAd projects
 Improve the performance of exported ad units
 Facilitate better pre-load behavior for assets in exported ad units
 Allow ad upload and testing with iOS devices connected via USB
 Reduce device memory usage for image views
 Enable use of image sprites
 Provide support for on-device debugging
 Enable Twitter integration in iAd content
 Simplify visualization of animations by providing an onion-skinning view
 Expand the types of assets that can be imported and managed in the asset library to include common document types
 Support the new media object in iAd JS
 Provide support for integration of WebGL assets in iAd content
 Extend device support to include The New iPad

Apple recently raised iAd developer revenue to 70 percent, up from 60 percent. The bump is reportedly meant to compensate for lower ad rates, which started at $1 million when the solution first debuted in 2010. iAd has seen dwindling interest and Apple lowered the minimum price of entry to $500,000 mere months after launch. Last July saw another decrease to $300,000 and the current minimum stands at $100,000.

The iPhone maker is looking to stoke the flames and released version 2.0 in November 2011, which brought animation tools and code-editing improvements to the platform.

I wonder what the adoption rate in % is in free apps is, seems to be pretty poor. In the numerous ios free apps I 've sampled I've yet to see it.

iAd is a good idea (who doesn't hate the google network of ads popping up everywhere and being of little taste and use?) but the starting minimum a couple of years ago sounds even by todays standards incredibly high. I think if apple wants to ever get it going they should raise developer revenue to 80%, or even just not take a cut out of it at all. The dev. should be able to get all the money from the ads they make via their app, since they offer it for free on the app store. If apple provide the tools to create such ads they should probably only be doing it so they can have free apps on their store which will give people more incentives to buy ios products.

Twitter integration could be huge. If an iAd dev creates a compelling ad that's fun to play with and convinces people to buy the product, users might want to tell people about it. And I gather a few of those users would more likely tweet about that product from the ad than leave the app and go to Safari, find the product page, and tweet manually from there.

Heck, if Twitter integration includes pulling tweets rather than solely pushing them, there are a few scenarios where that would be neat too.

I wonder what the adoption rate in % is in free apps is, seems to be pretty poor. In the numerous ios free apps I 've sampled I've yet to see it.

iAd is a good idea (who doesn't hate the google network of ads popping up everywhere and being of little taste and use?) but the starting minimum a couple of years ago sounds even by todays standards incredibly high. I think if apple wants to ever get it going they should raise developer revenue to 80%, or even just not take a cut out of it at all. The dev. should be able to get all the money from the ads they make via their app, since they offer it for free on the app store. If apple provide the tools to create such ads they should probably only be doing it so they can have free apps on their store which will give people more incentives to buy ios products.

"Free" is not what it used to be. Ad-supported apps end up costing the consumer in other ways.

"I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because theyre the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company."- Steve Jobs

This is one of reason why I hope iAds never becomes too big, because the last people we want to be (inadvertently) running Apple are advertising/sales guys.

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